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Coming Soon: A Plan
To Confiscate Your Car

By

Eric Peters

Updated May 9, 1996 11:59 p.m. ET

In the not too distant future, owning a second car, or one that is more than four years old, may be a legal impossibility -- if, that is, a law recently passed in New Jersey governing automobile emissions inspections is allowed to stand, and other states use it as a template for their own legislation.

The auto emissions law was signed by New Jersey's Republican governor, Christine Todd Whitman, last June. It provides for a centralized emissions inspection regime explicitly designed to fail most cars more than four years...